Rig A Stop Motion Mouth with Geometry Nodes (Blender 3.0)

hey i'm going to show you how to rig a stop-motion claymation mouth like mine using blender's geometry nodes let's get started so the demo you just saw actually fully utilizes the geometry nodes if i were to click on the mouth here and go over to the modifiers tab you can see i have this geometry node stack that if i drop down we have we have some different options here and we're going to learn how to make this and this number will correlate which mouth shape is being shown at the time the mouse shapes that i used here are based off of the visum chart from adobe character animator which i've been using a lot of recently and i made it with extra special tender love and care so for this tutorial you will need to follow along with at least blender 3.0 or further as it uses geometry nodes that aren't fully implemented into the 2.9 release [Music] i actually use the mouth shapes from ms so let's take a look at them i have what looks like objects that correlate to every every mouth shape you can solo an object using this right slash key the forward slash that's the a shape and this is the shape i created for d e shape i try to make all my vizzims which is what these are referred to in character animator these mouth shapes or vizzims i try to make all my vizzims somewhat asymmetrical just to make them feel real that just gives a little bit extra life to your character it doesn't make them seem so robotic and generated f um you can always look up a chart online and see different vizim shapes uh you can find some pretty good ones just by google image searching different vizim shapes i find l to be a really important shape especially as you get that tongue that really really helps sell a lot of words m is an important shape because it needs to be compressed you'll see m is different from neutral because neutral feels rested and relaxed you can keep the mouth in a regular shape but when it's m you're pushing your mouth closed it has potential energy almost this is sort of like oh there's the much smaller shape but um so basically that that's your first step create a set of mouth shapes if you purchase this project file not only will you be able to access the the node tree i built in geometry nodes but you'll also get all my mouth shapes as well if you just want to throw this on any character you want that you can use for any project you want commercial or or personal or just learning [Music] so i'm going to just start with a cube here and we can add our geometry nodes network to this cube we don't need the actual base geometry in fact it doesn't matter at all so i'll disconnect it but i'll even go as far as deleting it from the inputs because i don't want to see it over here what we do need is we need an integer i'm going to call this visine because visium is the term we use for mouth shape the a the d the f the m those are the visemes again i'm just going to change this type to integer so now that we've added this visum as an input you can see it's reflected over here in our modifiers stack over here visib we have a number right here i'm going to make the minimum zero it's not gonna let us go below zero and i'm just gonna make it 16. you can make that number whatever you want you can make it hundred 100 200 i mean you can have as many mouth shapes as you'd like to have so let's talk about the logic of this a little bit basically we want to look at here in this node network is the visine active and it's a very it's a very simple it's a very simple recursive task we're going to build here and it all is going to start with a switch and a switch is a basic basically an if statement here switch it basically says if condition whatever this condition is if this condition is false we're gonna we're gonna output whatever is in this one if it's true we'll output whatever is into this one right here and that can be geometry a float a bull anything but in this case we want geometry because we want to output the mouth shape here if it's true to here and if it's false we want to output no mouth shape for the specific vizm so i will hit ctrl g and we've built our node already if i actually go back we can see we have this node group here and i'll select it and if i go over to the node tab under properties i can just rename this node tab to be something that makes more sense so mouth shape and every time we have a new mouth shape we can just shift a and add a mouth shape we can just keep adding more mouth shapes in there for every mouth shape that we need and these are going to be the same mouth shape as you can see we have this little number two which indicates it's being used twice see if i were to duplicate this a third time we have three right this little number always indicates how many times it's being used whether this is a geometry nodes network or it's a regular node and materials that's sort of something you can always look for so if i were to go into this any changes i'm making in this node will be reflected into this and into this as you can see if i were to unconnect all of these here and i go out it's the same in this one it's basically because they're referencing the same node these are all the same node inside and out so just keep that in mind so if i go into this mouse shape we have a switch here and this switch is gonna say okay again we're gonna need a condition right what what is the condition that i need to switch upon well let's build that basically we want to check is the mouth shape we're talking about the active one and right now the active one is indicated by this vism slider so let's go into our inputs and let's let's implement that i'm just going to delete all of these here and we will add a new input we'll make sure it's an integer and we'll just call this vezim so we need to compare it to something so we need to assign every one of these mouth shapes and id so okay we can do that we can do another input and by default it already has integers selected since we did it last time and i'll just call this id i can check here and i can see okay we'll do math and we will say is the vizzim and the id compare them with a threshold of zero we need to know are these two exactly the same and if that is true again this is our condition we're comparing these and if this is true then it will show whatever's here and if it is false it will show nothing so let's set that up too we will get an object node an object info node and instead of selecting the object right here we can just pass that off as another variable so we'll say okay we'll we'll find out what object that is later and whatever that object is we'll take the geometry from that and we'll set it to true so this is set up already this is all we need really we'll see again is the vision and the id the same and if they are we're going to show the geometry from that group and we will just put that geometry out and if i go back here we can put that geometry directly to the group this is either going to show the geometry or show nothing and only one of these will end up being active at the end of the day so what we have to do here is we have to just join all these geometries together with a simple join geometry node we can just plug all of these into the same thing here we have the visine that we've set up earlier i'll just plug it in so if i go into this mouth shape here we're accepting a visibe and an id so let's look at the group output we're already putting out the geometry i can just add another one here and i can say id and i'll make sure this is an integer now what's really cool about this is i can just take the id we got from the first place and i can send it right to the output which means anything that goes into the id over here is going to come out on the other side as the id but we can also do math along this line so if i were to take another math node here and i'll set it to add i can put it in my id here let's just move down here and look and i can add one along this line so while we get the id here originally which in this case is zero even though it's zero here it's going to put out an id plus one so every time we go along this line now it's gonna add one that will recursively add one to this effectively giving each one a new id this id would be zero this id will be one i connect this up this id will be two and each one of these will need to access the visim so i can plug visim into all of these let's take a look at how this might work so we have three shapes right here i made these three shapes right and let's go ahead and select them so for mouth shape one or for the shape one we will use the eyedropper and we'll select the sphere okay mouth shape two we'll use the eyedropper and we'll select the cylinder and mouse shape three we can select the cone now you'll see it's already doing its job because vision zero is selected if i were to type in vision 1 it's going to change to the cylinder and why is that well let's take a look here it's going to compare vizim number right to what we originally started with was zero so it's going to say does 1 equal 0 no okay so that way it's not going to show the geometry for the sphere does one equal one because remember we added zero plus one from the id going into this id it's gonna say yes it does so that way it'll show the cylinder does 0 equal 2 does it equal 3 so on and so on and so on it's never going to equal true it's never going to be true other than one condition in one case and in that case it happens to be visible number one or really whatever vision is selected at the moment so we can we can actually delete these here and we can make it a little easier but you can just add as many mouth shapes as you need here we just have to connect all the visions up the same way so there we have uh we have eight eight different mouth shapes now it makes it really easy you can just run the object right back to the group input and now you're getting these object objects over here so now you can select your shapes directly from the actual property tab just remember it's really important that whenever you add more mouth shapes in the node editor you have to make sure you connect that previous id nodule from the last one to the new one that way you're getting the proper id number for comparison otherwise it just won't work you have to make sure those are connected okay just a little bit of cleanup there but now you have all of these all these shapes to go through and zero is going to refer to the first one here one two three four five six seven and so forth and again you can make as many of these as you want to and again i like to go through and rename these so whatever the shape is we'll call this neutral zero whatever the mouth shape is i just name it that and then plus the the the first number starting with zero after this just so that way you know which one it coordinates to so when you're animating it's easy to go through and see that [Music] i went through and i just selected each one of my mouth shapes for the individual for the individual vizim now as you can see i actually even left some open ones here if i want to do some extra expressions like like excited or or shocked or sad but as you can see if i were to add x access that number 12 no mouth shape will show because i haven't i haven't added one in there but the next step would be then going through and actually animating this and i found that it's it works surprisingly well so you'll want to make sure you're in the timeline here and then you'll have this little playback drop down by default it should be set to play every frame but you'll actually want to hit sync to audio and make sure scrubbing is selected let's just do the first part of this here together so right now except for a because that's the first reason down here um but i will set a keyframe here let's go back to neutral so visibe i'll hit zero and i'll keyframe that one thing i like to do is i hit a grab them all and you hit t and you set the interpolation to constant that way it will only change on the exact frame and it won't interpolate between other visuams so so right here hey this should already be the a sound be very literal with these sounds it's not e for h e y but it's the a so it's gonna be five so right here five hey so right here before that i'm already making some noise it's like a like a so that could be like an e sound maybe a d um you know it doesn't have to be specific but um you know the it's just really whatever looks the best so let's try a d right before it so i can like do a slide open and right here it's hey it almost transitions to an e afterwards right there so that's four let's try that four and it's just going through and finding those sounds and i'll set this back to neutral then zero and that quickly i i keyframed uh a word hey um we can set this to m which is one here keyframe uh six is right before it keyframe that you really have to find those letter transitions you know where is it transitioning from i'm gonna right where is the m transition to the g you know this is going to be playing around with these and finding finding what sounds right and just going through and working those letters there's no automatic lip sync built into blender while it is such a tedious process to go through and just manually tweak every letter so sometimes for a good lip sync that is necessary and it's a process you'll have to take but it's very rewarding once you're done you know seeing a character just speak um because it's one of those things that you know maybe ai well i'm sure ai will take over in the future but um right now automatic tools just aren't doing it justice and and even in character animator automatic tools will only get you so far you have to you really do have to go through when you have to do your own manual adjustments afterwards you know i probably went through before and i did this whole sentence maybe 25 minutes probably less than that hey i'm going to show you how to rig a stop-motion claymation mouth like mine using language geometry nodes let's get started see how the l's really stick out sometimes just again having that having that l visible in there really helps you like sell that sound so much better because it just feels natural it feels like the the tongue hits where it's supposed to [Music] so whether you make this face rig on your own or you go on gumroad and pick up my project file the cool thing here is you can totally reuse this very easily i'm in a brand new project right now where i just made this amorphous shape that i'm going to call a character um and you can be like oh all right my character's ready i need to have a mouth now we already have the mouth you can just go file link you can go to the folder where the where my project file is saved and i can just click on the project file make my way to the objects folder and i just want to link in the mouth and there it's linkedin the only thing you have to do is click on the mouth and go to the object tab over here and just hit this little button in the corner which allows you to keyframe the chart and the cool thing is it actually takes all the mouth shapes with it so that way you don't have to make your scene all like cluttered with the old mouth shapes they're just automatically referenced from the other project file and you just have this one mouth here that you can totally just parent to an armature or attach to a face somehow so that's it for this tutorial i want to make another tutorial very soon about the same process except for rigging a face so if you're having trouble following along with these nodes or you actually want to access the actual mouth shapes themselves to use on your own characters feel free to go pick up this project file on gumroad right now it's available for sale there and you can actually get the mouse shape and the node network to use on your own projects whether for commercial projects or for personal or learning it is for blender 3.0 or higher so just keep that in mind thanks for watching i hope you learned something from this tutorial and leave a comment and let me know what you thought or if this process could be useful for you again thanks for watching and i'll see you next time you

Channel: FruitZeus

Views: 1,890

Keywords: Blender Face Rig, Blender Mouth Rig, Geometry Nodes Blender Rig, Rig Geometry Nodes, Geometry Nodes Face Rig, Blender Simple Face Rig 3.0, Blender 3.0 Mouth Rig, Blender Geometry Nodes Tutorial, Blender Simple Face Rig, Blender Stop Motion Mouth Rig Tutorial, Blender Claymation Mouth Tutorial, Blender 3.0 Stop Motion, Blender Stop Motion, Blender 3.0 Geometry Nodes Tutorial, Blender Face Animation, blender geometry nodes, geometry nodes, blender rig tutorial, blender rig

Id: BfOLveHLMaM

Length: 17min 19sec (1039 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 27 2021